In July 2007, the Heads of Departments group of SAPC invited those of their retired predecessors and founder members of AUTGP they could trace to join them for their annual get-together in an Indian restaurant in South Kensington. Anxious to repay their hospitality and recognising that many of our stories of the early struggles and setbacks along the road to where we were now had never been properly recorded and were in danger of being lost, our cluster of veterans agreed to write about the early developments of our respective departments. Four years on, this book is the result.

Predictably, our writers did not want to be constrained by any particular format, although we originally signed up to a target length of around 1,000 words. At the end of two years we had six essays in; twenty-five to come! A number of founder heads were no longer with us, or no longer able to contribute, so we set about finding deputies. The original London schools proved a particular challenge, having been so complicated by later mergers and their earliest roots often hard to trace. Some of our most compelling essays have been written in the first person, but most are in the third person. Some were well over our target length; in some we identified important gaps; and some were referenced although most were not. Most problematically, some were concluded (naturally on the retirement of the author) in the late 1970s or early 1980s before other stories had started.